


Tomorrow

by Sir_Bedevere



Series: You're Gonna Love Tomorrow [1]
Category: Follies - Sondheim/Goldman
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, It's Ben Stone - this is not a happy story, Prequel, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-21 16:37:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18144719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sir_Bedevere/pseuds/Sir_Bedevere
Summary: Buddy had chosen the army, when they signed up, and Ben thought he’d lost his damn mind. Between the marching and the sleeping outside, Buddy had to be crazy. The navy was the thinking man’s choice – a bunk to call your own, three meals on time every day and no chance of marching till your feet bled.Sometime between college and that night in 1971, Ben Stone went away to the war.





	Tomorrow

Buddy had chosen the army, when they signed up, and Ben thought he’d lost his damn mind. Between the marching and the sleeping outside, Buddy had to be crazy. The navy was the thinking man’s choice – a bunk to call your own, three meals on time every day and no chance of marching till your feet bled. 

But the first time he is on a ship trapped between a shallow bay and an air attack, forced down instead of up because of the fire that was burning up on the deck, he thinks maybe Buddy had been right after all. Because the metal box will be his coffin, the day his luck runs out, and maybe the open air is a better choice after all.

*

Ben has never been great at having friends. People like him, because he can be whoever he needs to be for them, and that suits him just fine. He doesn’t need friends. Buddy had been the only one to stick around, and Ben liked him. He really did. Sometimes he feels bad because what had happened with Sally, but what Buddy doesn’t know won’t hurt him. 

Ben is alone now, same as he’d been before Buddy came along in college, with shipmates who like him well enough. They play cards and dice, and they swap dirty postcards, and he joins in with that, so what does it matter if they are friends or not? He thinks sometimes that he misses Buddy, when he knows that he’d have made a dumb joke or laughed at something Ben said, but he is not a sentimental man.

No one can ever accuse Ben Stone of being sentimental.

*

Phyllis sends him letters, long letters in her clumsy high school handwriting, and she tells him things he doesn’t want to know, and asks him questions that he can’t answer. Her letters come with gum and chocolate that he swaps for cigarettes. She doesn’t know that he has started smoking, and he just doesn’t tell her. He doesn’t know why, because she’d send him cigarettes if he asked for them. But he just doesn’t.

*

Sally’s letters are shorter, crude and filthy, and he reads them at night when the other men are asleep. They get him hot under the collar, and the next day he burns them. 

And he never replies.

*

“What you looking at, sailor boy?”

The woman is older than him, her hair up and exposing a wrinkled neck, but she is beautiful. Ben doesn’t mean to stop but he does. He was looking. No getting around that. 

The woman holds out a hand heavy with cheap rings, and she smiles.

“Come on, darling,” she says, her English heavy with the Philippine accent. “Come home with me.”

So he goes, and they make love all afternoon in her clean, basic room, and Ben thinks of nothing but her hands on him, and her lips on his. At the end, she wipes away his tears.

“You missing your girl, darling?” she asks, and Ben doesn’t reply because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why he’s crying.

“You be home soon,” the woman soothes, gives him a cigarette from his own pack. “It will all be over soon.”

*

“You’re a funny guy,” Frankie says to him, as they sit side by side on the deck. “Anyone ever told you that you’re a funny guy?”

“No.”

“Well, you are.” Frankie draws on his cigarette and tries to blow a smoke ring that doesn’t work.

“I don’t think I am.”

“I don’t mean funny ha ha,” Frankie says. “I mean that every time I think I know you, you twist away.”

Frankie is from New York too and thinks that he is some kind of poet because he once wrote a play. Ben shrugs and flicks his cigarette butt into the sea. 

“Lawyers have to be inscrutable,” he says. 

“Yeah. But right now, buddy, you ain’t a lawyer.”

*

In the middle of a battle with the Japanese planes roaring and the rattle of guns ringing in his ears, Ben Stone loses whatever faith he still has in the God his mother raised him praying to.

*

Phyllis wants to know if he will marry her when he gets home, and she always talks like that too - _when you get home._ Like she is in no doubt that he will, and he’ll want her when he does. 

Sometimes at night he wakes up thinking he can hear a plane overhead and he bites his hand to stop himself from crying out. But it is alright to do that here, because the other men all do it too. What will happen if he marries Phyllis and she sees what he is now? What will happen if he is like this for the rest of his life?

*

Sally stops writing. 

He’s relieved.

*

One minute Frankie is there at his side, yelling at him to move, and the next thing Ben knows, Frankie is on the deck beside him and he’s missing half his face.

*

“Abandon ship!”

The shout is almost lost in the sound of explosions and screaming, the roar of the fire down below as it picks off the engineers one by one. They’re trapped, and there’s nothing to be done so Ben jumps instead. The lifeboats are mostly shot to pieces, so the only choice is the water. 

More than one ship has made the call to abandon, and the water is a mass of men. Some are dead and some are alive, and the living are panicking. Ben is a strong swimmer and he’s doing okay, ignoring the corpses and the body parts and the blood and just swimming, because when the ship goes down he needs to be far away from it. 

But not all the men are so good, and some are injured and all of them are scared, and some are so desperate to live that they are grabbing hold of the nearest thing, which is each other. Ben swims past a little guy barely holding his head above the water as another man clings onto him. The man’s eyes are milky white and Ben understands that he’s blinded, and he’s out of his mind with fear. 

So Ben grabs him, unwraps his arms from the little guy and Ben screams in his ear, “Stop! I’ve got you! Stop!”

The man is sobbing in Ben’s arms as the little guy swims away, and Ben yells again.

“I’ve got you!”

He did a lifesaving course once, and he swims them both into the open water, where another ship is already creeping towards them, guns firing at the straggling planes. The man is limp in his arms and Ben can tread water alright, so he holds him tight, the tightest he has held anyone since he left home for this, and blinks his eyes hard against the blood pouring down his face. 

When they are eventually picked up, someone plucks the man from his arms and Ben feels his strength go. He slips below the water and everything goes dark as it closes over his head. 

*

By the time he wakes up, a bandage on his head, the war is almost over and he is on the way home. When he can sit up, he looks around and sees none of the guys that he served with, not in this part of the hospital ship anyway. A nurse asks him if he wants her to look for anyone and he shakes his head. Frankie is dead, that much he knows. 

He does see the man he saved though, in a bed near to his. They keep him doped up and sleeping because he lost his hearing as well as his sight, and when he is awake he just screams and screams. Ben thinks he knows how he feels, and wonders if it would have been kinder to let him die with his brothers. 

*

He marries Phyllis, because she is there waiting for him when he gets home, and she’s soft and beautiful and kind and nothing about her reminds him of the war. He might even think that he loves her. 

*

_Lawyers don’t get shot._

He’d said that to Phyllis once, back before the war, or maybe to Sally…it is hard to remember. But whichever one he’d told, he wants them to know that he had been right. Lawyers don’t get shot. But sailors sure as hell do. 

Shot at. Blown to pieces. Burnt to death. Drowned. Blinded. Deafened. Driven mad with fear. 

Ben Stone has seen it all.

**Author's Note:**

> Me again, chilling in my niche. 
> 
> For Misty, because she's here with me <3


End file.
